Announcing our 2022/23 Season!
The Lyric Stage Company of Boston has created a season of plays that will inspire audiences to share in one-of-a-kind experiences that only live theater can create. It’s a season to gather together and connect with the friends we come with and the ones we make in the seat next to us. That spark of inspiration, delight, and joy awaits you as the lights go down and the spotlight comes up on stories that are at the core of what it means to be in this world together.
FABULATION OR, THE RE-EDUCATION OF UNDINE
By Lynn Nottage
Directed by Dawn M. Simmons
September 16 – October 9, 2022
From the penthouse to mom’s house. A riches-to-rags story asking “can you ever really go home again?”
Success. Love. Fabulous wardrobe. Undine has it all. Until her husband steals her hard-earned fortune, sending her tumbling down the social ladder. Pregnant and penniless, with life unraveling at every turn, Undine is forced to return home to Brooklyn and the family she left behind, in a complicated new reality. In this satirical comedy by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage (Intimate Apparel, Meet Vera Stark, Sweat) while life unravels, hope can be found in small victories and in the discovery of finding happiness within.
THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG
By Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer & Henry Shields
Directed by Fred Sullivan Jr.
November 11 – December 18, 2022
It’s so bad, it’s good.
“Break a leg!” takes on a whole new meaning for a woefully misguided troupe of players at the Cornley University Society’s opening night performance of The Murder at Haversham Manor. An unconscious leading lady, a corpse who can’t play dead, a ruffled detective, and a word-mangling butler (among others) must battle against technical gaffes, forgotten lines, and sabotaging scenery in a quest to arrive all in one piece at the final curtain call. Part Monty Python, part Sherlock Holmes, all mayhem, this 1920s whodunit is disastrously delightful.
PRELUDES
By Dave Malloy
Directed by Courtney O’Connor
Music Director Dan Rodriguez
January 6 – February 5, 2023
“I just want to be remembered.”
When success and failure collide can a young Rachmaninoff rediscover his musical genius?
A musical fantasia, Preludes unfolds in the hypnotized mind of composer and virtuoso pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff as he attempts to overcome his writer’s block following a disastrous premiere of his Symphony No. 1 in D minor. In an array of hypnotic reveries, he is invigorated by some of the most influential artists of the time including Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Tchaikovsky. Creativity is unlocked and ignited through Dave Malloy’s (Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812) bewitching mashup of original compositions and Rachmaninoff’s own work that takes us on a glorious journey on an artist’s quest to secure a legacy and reclaim a voice.
THE GREAT LEAP
By Lauren Yee
Directed by Michael Hisamoto
February 24 – March 19, 2023
Every game is a second chance.
He went to China for basketball but quickly finds himself playing a very different game.
It’s 1989 San Francisco and Manford Lum, a gifted, fast-talking teenager, dominates the high school basketball courts. Facing an uncertain future, he convinces Saul, a cynical and crusty coach, to let him travel to Beijing for a “friendship” game in China. Waiting there is a Chinese national coach with unfinished business, both with Saul and with Manford. On the eve of historic demonstrations, all three men are challenged to define their pasts and their futures.
SISTER ACT
Music by Alan Menken
Lyrics by Glenn Slater
Book by Bill and Cheri Steinkellner with additional material by Douglas Carter Beane
Directed by Leigh Barrett
April 7 – May 14, 2023
And then there were nuns.
A divine, feel-good musical comedy.
After witnessing a murder, free spirited, disco diva Deloris Van Cartier finds herself in protective custody at a convent. At odds with a rigid Mother Superior, and a strict lifestyle, Deloris finds divine intervention bringing the choir from dour to dazzling with her signature style. While Deloris is busy raising the roof, her cover is blown and her new-found sisterhood rallies around her with a lot of love (and maybe a few sequins) in a tribute to the power of friendship.
ROOTED
By Deborah Zoe Laufer
Directed by Courtney O’Connor
June 2 – 25, 2023
In this offbeat comedy, what happens when two sisters accidentally start a cult?
In the claustrophobic town of Millerville, Emery Harris lives alone in a treehouse named Mabel surrounded by a dozen or so plants she researches, names, and talks to. Her overbearing sister Hazel is Emery’s only connection to reality, along with her YouTube channel where she documents her studies that have garnered several thousand followers. When her calm and quiet is disrupted by an entourage of devotees chanting and singing to her – their botanical, new-age messiah –-she is forced to look down from the branches and face the outside world.